A not so fun fact about me is that I couldn’t really read until I was eleven years old. Even then I was not reading at my grade level. The reason for this was a combination of a learning disability and my parents’ choice to educate me at home, despite neither of them having any formal experience or training. But hey, James Dobson told them on a radio program that they needed to do that, so they did.
It would be a few more years before I’d catch up and then get a big appetite and devour all the things I’d been missing. I had always loved stories, so I dove deeply into all the classics we had laying around like Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Hobbit, and so on. I loved reading so much that I almost changed my major in college to English, but then wrote a disastrous paper on Eliot’s The Waste Land and decided I was better off just keeping English as my minor.
A couple of years ago I took some inspiration from Tara Wheeler and decided to get away from comfort reading and read new things. You can check out her year long blog post abut it here. https://www.tarah.org/2023/03/03/a-year-of-reading-only-new-things/
Last year my wife and I had our first kiddo so I didn’t get to finish nearly as many books as I would have liked. But I did read two Ann Leckie novels, the rest of Le Guin’s Earthsea, and The Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. Of course I also read a lot of material and books related to Cybersecurity Risk Management and Cloud Security, but that was more a requirement for two certifications I was working on. I also got through more of Steven Levy’s Hackers. I’ve been reading for two years now. It’s a little less than five hundred pages but has some of the densest writing I’ve seen outside of a graduate school dissertation course. However, if you want the definitive story on the birth and history of hacker culture, its the go-to read.
As you can see from the photo, right now I have a stack of ten books on my desk with three more on the way and another I plan to pick-up when it’s released at the end of January. Not pictured are Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy. I’ve read his short story collection, Burning Chrome, but the Sprawl Trilogy is a massive hole in my cyberpunk reading list. One of my favorite genre literature podcasts is covering in the first half of the year, so I finally have some incentive.
Last year I started off the year with the goal of reading a daily stoic proverb. I quickly realized stoicism is not my bag. Much the opposite, in fact. This year I am going to lean on the wisdom of Fred Rogers on a daily basis and see how that goes. Many of the books I have lined up this year are built around my goals for building a more robust vulnerability management program. I am also working on yet another security certification, this time around secure software lifecycle management, so many books will be read in support of that. A good friend of mine has been recommending Everybody Loves Our Town to me for years now. He knows what a huge Grunge fan I am and says it’s the very best book on that era of music. It’ll be the first book of the year. I am also extremely excited about Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine. I’m a big fan of Ed Zitron’s podcast and he’s had Brian on a few times over the last year. It sounds like Brian did some extremely extensive research for his book.
My goal will be to write up a summary and brief review of each of these as I complete them. I am also sure some additional things will pop up during the year not to mention unread items I may potentially pull off my bookshelf. Happy New Year and happy reading!